Lucy Liu's Kill Bill Wardrobe Has A Secret Pulp Fiction Homage

Quentin Tarantino's revenge action-thriller "Kill Bill" is back in the public eye, thanks to the digital release of "Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair," the 2006 director's cut that combines the two movies into one. While Beatrix "The Bride" Kiddo (Uma Thurman) is the undisputed star of "Kill Bill," the movie has many more of Tarantino's most powerful women, including Yakuza boss O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu).

In keeping with her Japanese heritage, O-Ren wears kimonos. While having dinner with her underbosses (and slicing one of their heads off after he insults her), she wears a black kimono with a white inner garment. When she faces the Bride at the House of Blue Leaves, her outfit has flipped: a white kimono on a black garment. These outfits were both Lucy Liu's ideas.

In an interview with Vogue, Liu discussed her input in bringing O-Ren to life. While she was only complimentary of Tarantino's talent and his "beautiful" script, Liu envisioned O-Ren differently while reading that script.

"This kimono originally almost wasn't a kimono. Originally, Quentin wanted me to wear something very different, and he wanted me to wear this kind of communist gray [oufit]. [...] I saw something very different, and I just saw there was an elegance about [O-Ren] and a femininity that I wanted to retain."

Liu suggested that O-Ren wear kimonos, an outfit associated with elegant femininity in Japan. The color schemes of O-Ren's kimonos, Liu said, were her pulling on Tarantino's previous film "Pulp Fiction," where hitmen Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent (John Travolta) wear black suits and ties and white shirts when on the job.

(If you want an idea of the costume Tarantino had in mind, note O-Ren's right hand Sofie (Julie Dreyfus), who always wears a one-piece collared dress.)

Jules and Vincent's suits in "Pulp Fiction" are snazzy and stylish, immediately contrasting them as professionals next to the amateur criminals they're assigned to kill in the movie's opening scene. One of the most remembered images in "Pulp Fiction" is the pair standing side by side in their suits holding their guns, and it's easy to see why.

Black-and-white is the most extreme color contrast there is, and one that's never really gone out of style. There's another key piece of costuming in "Pulp Fiction" that employs it: Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman, her first role in a Tarantino movie), dresses in black pants and a white button-down dress shirt. Mia's blank white shirt helps bring out her black bobbed hair, too. O-Ren's own hair, worn up, makes her look extra prim and tightly controlled in "Kill Bill." Notice how her hair only comes down after the Bride slices the top of her head off.

Liu told Vogue that the change to O-Ren's costuming "changed the direction of how O-Ren was able to be received." O-Ren's outfits definitely make her look as cool as any "Pulp Fiction" character, while also concealing her deadliness. She dresses like an elegant Japanese woman, but she's such sharp steel that the silk barely hides it.

The best villains feel like the hero of their own story, and O-Ren definitely does. She receives a dedicated backstory, told through an anime sequence stitched into the otherwise live-action "Kill Bill." Her parents were murdered by a mob boss, so she avenged them and climbed the ladder of the international crime world. It's a shame she's complicit in the Bride's attempted murder, too, and that only one of these women can walk away from their duel.